Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie: Pyramid of Light

by Tom Ingram

Two “duelists” battle each other in a trading card game where the monsters on the cards come to life.

It’s kind of a shame that the Yu-Gi-Oh! TV show doesn’t hold up when you’re no longer eight years old. It has a certain inexplicable charm, and the card game and some of the video games it inspired are legitimately good. Its premise is strange, but opens up huge possibilities. The show itself being bad is not surprising or interesting: that’s no fun at all. I don’t actually like hating things.

But unfortunately the show (and this movie, which is essentially an ordinary episode extended) deserves our hate. It’s obviously designed to have the widest profit margins possible. They skimp on the animation and use plots that might as well be computer generated. Characters always win by chance, never by clever moves, and all this is accompanied by waffly talk about “the heart of the cards” that brainwashes children into muddled thinking in mathematical situations. I really wanted to like the movie, but I just can’t justify it.